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Can Marketing Automation Solve Your Pain Points?

We spend a lot of time at Pardot discussing what our clients’ pain points are prior to implementing marketing automation. As it turns out, a lot of them are dealing with the same issues, whether it’s an inefficient lead management system, a desire to track marketing metrics, or a lack of resources.

Luckily, marketing automation is designed to combat common problems like these. If you’re struggling with managing your marketing or sales processes and have started researching alternative solutions, take a look at how marketing automation can address some of the pain points that you may be dealing with.

1. “We have a CRM, but it can’t handle any of our marketing needs.”

This is a really common problem among today’s marketers. CRMs are great at customer management, but they aren’t made to handle more robust functionalities like lead scoring and grading, lead nurturing, and reporting. Marketing automation platforms are designed to integrate with your existing CRM to provide these additional capabilities — without losing any of the data that you already have.

2. “We have no process in place for assigning leads, qualifying them, and moving them through the sales cycle.”

Many marketing and sales teams are struggling with how to create a process to move leads through the sales funnel. With marketing automation, marketing can manually assign leads to sales reps, or leads can automatically be assigned based on their actions or information. Scoring and grading make lead qualification and assignment easier by allowing marketers to customize which actions are the most important (and therefore should be given the most weight).

Without a way to measure the effectiveness of their marketing efforts, marketers are left guessing when it comes to planning their next campaign. Using a system like marketing automation can give you insight into your open and click-through rates on email, your cost per lead, the number of opportunities or closed deals resulting from specific campaigns, revenue generated during a specified time period, and more.

4. “We’ve got a lot of content, but we have no way to market and distribute it.”

This is another common problem among today’s marketers. With all of the hype surrounding content marketing, many marketers are doing a great job of creating content to engage and bring in customers. The problem is that they have no way to market and distribute this content once it’s created. A tool like marketing automation is great for this, because it relies on content to support email, lead nurturing, and lead generation efforts. If you’re looking for a way to get your content out there, consider using it in drip campaigns, or putting it behind a form on your site to promote your lead gen efforts.

5. “We have a one-size-fits-all marketing approach with very little personalization.”

With no way to target or segment leads, marketers are forced into a “one-size-fits-all” marketing approach. Fortunately, marketing automation allows you to segment leads by a variety of criteria like location, industry, job title, product line, and more. Using these segments, marketers can send out targeted communications with content relevant to particular segments.

6. “We’re short on resources, so we don’t have a ton of bandwidth for marketing initiatives.”

Marketing automation is a great tool for marketers with limited resources. With the ability to automate many manual marketing tasks like importing and assigning leads, drip campaigns, reporting, and email marketing, marketing automation can decrease time spent on more tedious tasks and increase the time available for pursuing more advanced marketing initiatives.

Are there any other pain points that you think should be on this list? Let us know in the comments!